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Introduction

Brahms was probably the first great composer to value folksong as a source of inspiration and renewal, a source of national pride and a gift to composers that came directly from the people—a provenance that was sometimes more a matter of fantasy than reality. He was singularly in love with the idea of folksong as a kind of manifestation of national unity (and this before the unification of Germany in 1871), and there are few other composers who took such painstaking care to incorporate folksong melodies into their compositions. In his Brahms’s Lieder (English translation 1928) Max Friedländer writes:

From the time when, in his twentieth year, he introduced a folksong air into his first published work, the pianoforte sonata in C major, he returned again and again to the German folksong: in the years 1850–59, 38 times; 1860–69 , 39 times; 1870–79, 50 times; 1880–89, 24 times; and 1890–94, 56 times … As a source for German folksongs Brahms used for the most part the collections of Friedrich Nicolai, Andreas Kretzschmer and August Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio.

Herein lies the problem with Brahms as a student and exponent of folksong: he lived rather too early to benefit from real, disciplined scholarship in this field, and he trusted his various sources to be as truthful and reliable as he himself would have been. There were obviously a considerable number of melodies and texts that were indeed gathered from authentic folksong sources, but at a time when there was a vogue for this kind of music, and a market that allowed and encouraged a romanticized view of the form that went back to the Des Knaben Wunderhorn anthology, it was easy for someone like Zuccalmaglio (who clearly had a knack for pastiche) simply to invent folksong-like ditties and pass them off as age-old material. Brahms was completely fooled by this, and on several occasions lovingly lavished his attentions on what he imagined were genuine folksongs and were in fact Zuccalmaglio’s original compositions. It is little wonder that composers of a later age who used folksong material tended to trust the melodies most that they had gathered for themselves.

Brahms was particularly proud of the 49 folksong settings with piano accompaniment—42 solo songs and seven songs with solo singer and chorus (SATB)—published in 1894. He regarded this as the crowning achievement of his life’s work, a body of work that had a connection with the soil of the country and his reply to the output of Wagner who had created works around old German sagas. The practitioners of the so-called music of the future, such as Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner, had no interest in genuine folk music. With the arrival of the new century, and composers like Bartók, Kodály, d’Indy, Vaughan Williams and Grainger, Brahms’s earlier enthusiasm for folk material makes him something of a pioneer; his admiration of Antonín Dvorák was enlightened for the time in Viennese terms and was inextricably connected with that composer’s absorption in the folksong of his own country. It is interesting that there was no great composer in the more modern German tradition who attempted to broach this repertoire and arrange it with greater authenticity. Instead the Knaben Wunderhorn settings of Mahler created an even more sophisticated simulacrum of folk music tinged with humour, and irony—a palimpsest of sources old and new, genuine and fake, where so-called authenticity ceased to be an issue of importance or interest. Perhaps the question of authenticity mattered less with a dominant language and culture like German, than with those languages like Hungarian and Czech (and to an extent English) that were struggling to achieve their independence from the very German tradition that Brahms represented. Nevertheless, when it comes to folksong in Germany there is no composer before or since who has done as much as Johannes Brahms and this may have something to do with the fact that he always identified himself deep down, and with considerable contrariness, as a working-class, rather than a middle-class, artist.

Recordings

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The text of this enchanting song is from F W Arnold’s collection and probably dates from the seventeenth century. There are more verses in the original source. As for the tune, this is an instance when Brahms knowingly imported into his folksong collection something that was not a folksong at all—but perhaps should have been from the point of view of its melodic memorability. The tune was said to have been composed by a friend of Brahms in 1850 as they were travelling by boat up the Rhine, and carefully preserved in the composer’s memory for over forty years. The chromatic harmonization of the last four bars of each strophe, the pianist’s right hand ascending in semitones, implies the stealthy yet determined approach of a suitor, courtly yet insistent, and not ashamed to use wheedling charm when necessary.

Guten Abend, mein tausiger Schatz dates from as early as 1858. It is No 26 of the 28 folksongs that Brahms sent to Clara Schumann in that year (WoO32), a collection that was published only in 1926, and only some of which appeared in the much later WoO33. The text must have attracted him enormously as he set another song to these same words, Spannung Op 84 No 5 (c1877), which is completely different melodically and harmonically. These words are also set as No 7 of Acht deutsche Volkslieder WoO36 for three- and four-part women’s voices. Here the melody, purporting to be a folk melody, is really by Zuccalmaglio. In the 1840 collection by that composer the melody is said to come from the Lower Rhine, which is true enough as Zuccalmaglio himself came from that region! The piano accompaniment for this arrangement is arranged in quavers for the first three verses, semiquavers for the last three.

The song starts slowly in duple time, the piano wanly trailing the voice in dejected echo. The second section is in 3/4 (a feature of rustic dance music this) and is marked Lebhaft. The music suddenly bursts into flame with leaping, hocketing quavers in the vocal line chased by the piano in imitation, as if it were the pianist’s responsibility to contain the emotional fire that has been kindled by a devastating separation, a losing battle. Brahms somehow manages to suggest sadness, even desperation, without going anywhere near the minor mode, as if love burns brightly in the major whether or not reciprocated. The poem and the tune that goes with it have been stitched together by Zuccalmaglio from disparate sources. He says that this is from ‘Western Vosges’, one of those vague attributions of his that sound scholarly but are very difficult to take seriously.

This is a genuine folksong from Swabia, a real favourite of the recital platform, which Brahms found on page 383 of the second Zuccalmaglio volume (both words and music) where the title is Trennung. He had already used these words in 1886 for a Lied setting with his own melody (Trennung Op 97 No 6). For this song Brahms had invented a folksong-style tune of his own, but this is a case when the age-old melody is more memorable. In Trennung we encounter some of the same piano writing, in the postlude particularly, that was recycled eight years later in Da unten im Tale. Brahms adopts a gently mournful approach to the scenario (in some performances this song can be heartbreaking) but the song was apparently collected from a pair of country maidens who had known the melody from childhood and performed it with a merry lilt.

In this long narrative poem in ten verses Brahms varies the accompaniment some four times. Churchy crotchets underpin the narrative for the first three strophes; the next three are accompanied by semiquavers and quavers between the hands; verses 7–9 become rather more chromatically interesting, and the final verse with the unlikely appearance of the angel reverts to the crotchets of the beginning. There is another verse printed in the Zuccalmaglio source that the composer does not use. The tune is almost certainly not authentic and another Zuccalmaglio invention.

Brahms took these words and this tune from the second volume of Zuccalmaglio (p. 120) where it is entitled Die Versuchung (The Temptation) and ascribed to North Germany. But Friedländer doubts its authenticity, pointing to phrases in the poem which strike a false note, in particular the mention of blue silk stockings (which is excluded in any case from the Brahms song). Whether or not this is a ‘proper’ or original folksong Brahms, with a minimalist but highly effective accompaniment, makes it the perfect picture of one, and those tripping yet slightly plaintive repetitions of ‘La la la la …’ have won over many a heart. English speakers may notice a similarity to ‘Soldier, soldier, will you marry me?’.

This charming song—suitably marked Anmutig bewegt—is in strophic form, like almost all of the folksong settings. The first two verses are accompanied by discreet quavers, delicately separated by rests at the beginning, as if bowing in gentlemanly manner to an imaginary lady. As the text becomes more passionate the piano-writing for the third and fourth verses flowers into semiquavers which weave a graceful wreath around the vocal line. There are six further verses to the poem, which probably predates the rather similar morning hymn by Hans Sachs which is sung in the last scene of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. As in the folksong Nur ein Gesicht auf Erden lebt (No 19 in the collection) the melody appears at the end of the second of Zuccalmaglio’s volumes with the heading Kleiner feiner Almanac. This refers to the 1777–8 satirical publications of Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) for which the North German composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814) provided the music. This pretty melody is thus neither a folksong nor a Zuccalmaglio fabrication, but a composition by an important composer in Lieder history—a friend of Goethe, one of the founding fathers of the North German Lieder school, a frequent inspiration to Franz Schubert, and Felix Mendelssohn’s favourite song composer.

This is one of the folksong arrangements that could easily have appeared in a Lieder volume, so beautifully worked out and relatively elaborate is the accompaniment. The melody appears at the end of the second of Zuccalmaglio’s volumes with the heading Kleiner feiner Almanac. This refers to the 1777–8 satirical publications of Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) for which the North German composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814) provided the music. This pretty melody is thus neither a folksong nor a Zuccalmaglio fabrication, but a composition by an important figure in Lieder history who was a friend of Goethe and was one of the founding fathers of the North German Lieder school, a frequent inspiration to Franz Schubert. Of course Brahms made this song his own with his arrangement and accompaniment.

This is one of the genuine folksongs to be found in Zuccalmaglio (there are some!). It comes from the Odenwald mountains and was collected there in 1828, although the music itself is clearly much older. Zuccalmaglio changed the melody (elongating the first ‘mein’) to make it sound more ancient. The accompaniment is rather uninventive—in these arrangements it is rare to find the simple doubling of the vocal line with piano and left-hand crotchets pulsating in the bass. It seems Brahms was rather at a loss in harmonizing and arranging a tune of this kind.

Where are you going, proud girl?
What have I done to you,
That you should walk past me
And not look at me at all?
When I see you coming, I greet you,
You walk past me without a thank you;
The time will come,
When you shall think of me.

The roses in the forest
Blossom in fresh splendour,
Soon they will have faded,
Withered over-night.
When a rose turns to dust,
Another blossoms on the bough,
And if the one does not,
The other will smile on me.

This is another case of Brahms being happy to use unalloyed major-key tonality to describe rejection and hurt, although the ignored lover threatens, not altogether convincingly, that he will find someone else just as attractive. Whatever the intensity or veracity of the young man’s complaints (and this may be just a passing tiff) the appeal of this setting (almost certainly based on something invented by Zuccalmaglio) is the ingenious dovetailing of vocal line and piano. The strength of the bass line is exemplary, as is the economy and sophistication of the three-part writing that blossoms into four parts to give only an occasional hint of effulgence. All in all this is the work of a master technician, easily overlooked by those listeners who have never had to attempt harmony exercises. The careful placing of rests in the otherwise seamless flow of piano crotchets suggests the swagger, insouciant but not quite convincing, of a young man who is hurt and perplexed, but who would rather die than admit it. The interlude and postlude, both marked forte, depict pique and defiance, but there is a clinginess to this music where voice and piano are welded closely enough to suggest that the young man would come running if ‘die Stolze’ gave him half an excuse to do so.

This is one of the most often performed of all folksong settings, and a firm favourite in the recital hall. The syncopations in the accompaniment perfectly illustrate the impatience asked for in the song’s marking. The delightful two-bar postlude, where the accompanist must play forte octaves in a falling sequence, supported by syncopated left-hand chords, seems to indicate the moment where this enthused swain draws breath, or rather gulps it, in order to recommence his paean of praise to his beloved. The high spirits and giddy devotion expressed here by the young man are not often to be encountered in late Brahms. He was inspired by the tune of course which could hardly have been set in any other way. Brahms’s source was probably another one of those unauthentic pastiches by Zuccalmaglio which undermined the scholarly credentials of his folksong collection at the same time as deepening its musical attractions as far as the non-purists were concerned. Brahms’s attitude seems to have been that if Zuccalmaglio really was the composer of a melody like this, with all the inevitability of a genuine folksong, he was to be admired all the more.

There was a margrave who lived across the Rhine,
He had three beautiful daughters.
Two of the daughters married young,
The third, she laid him in his grave;
Then she went to sing at her sister’s door:
‘Ah, don’t you need a serving-maid here?’

‘What, my girl, you are much too grand,
You like to mix with the gentry.’
‘Ah no, that is not true,
My honour means much more to me.’
She hires the girl for one year,
The girl serves her for seven.

And when the seven years were past,
The girl became sick and weak.
‘Ah, my girl, if you are going to be ill,
Tell me who your parents are?’
My father was margrave by the Rhine,
I am his youngest daughter.’

‘Ah no, ah no, I do not believe
That you are my youngest sister.’
‘If you will not believe me,
Then go to my coffer there,
On which my name is written—
You can see it with your own eyes.’

And when she came to the coffer,
The tears ran down her cheeks:
‘Ah, bring me bread, ah bring me wine,
That is my youngest sister!’
‘I want no bread, I want no wine,
I want nothing but a small coffin!’

Brahms engaged deeply with folksong throughout his creative life, from his Op 1 Piano Sonata to the forty-nine Deutsche Volkslieder published in 1894, of which he declared that no other work had given him so much pleasure. In 1860 he wrote to his muse and confidante Clara Schumann: ‘Song composition is currently sailing on so false a course that one cannot sufficiently remind oneself of an ideal: and that to me is German folksong.’ The boundaries between traditional folk and latter-day fake were sometimes blurred, not least in the collection assembled by August Kretzschmer and Anton von Zuccalmaglio which Brahms drew on for his folksong arrangements. But more than authenticity, the composer valued the unadorned beauty and immediacy of the melodies. He set the touching tale Es war ein Markgraf as a doleful waltz, using the same haunting tune throughout but varying the accompaniment in the third and fourth verses with flowing quavers and hints of counterpoint.

O mother, I want to have a thingy!
‘What sort of thing, child of my heart?’
A thingy, a thingy!
‘Is it a doll that you want?’
No, mother, no!
You’re not a good mother,
You don’t know what a thingy is,
The thingy that your child wants.
Thingalingthingthing!

O mother, I want to have a thingy!
‘What sort of thing, child of my heart?’
A thingy, a thingy!
‘Is it a ring that you want?’
No, mother, no!
You’re not a good mother,
You don’t know what a thingy is,
The thingy that your child wants.
Thingalingthingthing!

O mother, I want to have a thingy!
‘What sort of thing, child of my heart?’
A thingy, a thingy!
‘Is it a dress that you want?’
No, mother, no!
You’re not a good mother,
You don’t know what a thingy is,
The thingy that your child wants.
Thingalingthingthing!

O mother, I want to have a thingy!
‘What sort of thing, child of my heart?’
A thingy, a thingy!
‘Is it a husband you want?’
Yes, mother, yes!
You’re a good mother,
You know what a thingy is,
The thingy that your child wants!
Thingalingthingthing!

In Zuccalmaglio (Volume 2 p. 348) the title is Der Tochter Wunsch (The Daughter’s Wish) and the melody (printed there in E major as it also appears in the Brahms) is ascribed to the Cologne region. This is a genuine folksong and a widespread and popular one; it is also perhaps the most risqué in the collection, and singers can make much more of it now than would have been permitted on the stage in Brahms’s day. In modern times it is sometimes performed as a duet. The accompaniment is rather more excitable and complicated than is the norm in this collection: the mother’s increasingly exasperated questions are rather plainly set, but the girl’s answers are underpinned by a touch of hysterical excitement engendered by staccato semiquavers between the hands.

As in Da unten im Tale Brahms had made a solo version of these words earlier in his career—in this case some thirty-five years earlier: the remarkable and expansive Vor dem Fenster Op 14 No 1 which dates from 1858. The words are probably more genuine than the tune—the modulation in the middle does not strike the ear as age-old. As in many of these folksongs it is impossible to say where and how (and exactly when) the original sources have been changed and ‘improved’. Nevertheless, it makes a fine little recital piece and the piano writing, subtly varied in terms of texture and tessitura, gently reinforces the emotional import of the text.

Brahms had already set this text for Vor dem Fenster Op 14 No 1 in September 1858—a masterly solo song. This folksong arrangement is no less masterly with an accompaniment that gradually becomes more animated. The melody and words seem to be genuine, but their age is not clear. The modulation in mid-strophe here is a possible sign of an old tune that has been arranged into a more modern shape.

It is highly likely that the tune and the words are not at all genuine folksong material, and that they are the invention of Zuccalmaglio. Nevertheless, Brahms responds with enthusiasm to the challenge and various violinistic devices translated into pianistic terms are gleefully employed to enliven the setting.

The piano’s opening bars, minims in quasi chorale, suggest the solidity of a linden tree, the kind that typifies an imaginary German village of yore, and under which countless lovers, including those in Schubert’s Winterreise, have plighted their troth. The wafting quaver movement of the accompaniment suggest branches swaying in the wind (verse 1), the flitting of a bird from branch to branch (verse 2) and gently running water (verse 3), a musical economy typical of late Brahms. The poem is by Wilhelm Tappert (1830–1907) who affixed it to a melody he claimed came from a Nuremberg collection from 1550. He published it in the 1870s as No 24 of Deutsche Lieder aus dem 15., 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, a collection Tappert dedicated to Wagner. The tune is eerily reminiscent of Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund. The vocal melismas on ‘trauren’ in the first verse, and then ‘klagen’, and finally ‘weinen’ (echoed in the piano only once, six bars from the end) are unusual for these folksong settings where one note per syllable is the order of the day. This stems from the Tappert arrangement. Indeed, Brahms did little other than discreetly rearrange the piano part, substituting his more noble accompaniment for Tappert’s chugging and rather uninspired quavers. The way in which the line ‘Daß ich mein’ Lieb’ verloren hab’’ is set twice, first as a two-bar phrase, and then as a four-bar phrase with longer note values, is also unusual, and this is a genuinely Brahmsian touch. As a result this faux folksong setting teeters on the borders of art song.

Perhaps this is because the words are contemporary pastiche; Brahms knew this of course and seemed to have little scruple in including them among all the other texts, some of which were genuinely ancient. Authenticity in any strict musicological sense seems not to have mattered to him: if the words or music were imitations of the ‘real thing’ they were excluded only if they were ineffective; if they touched him they were allowed into the fold. In fact, he would sooner use an effective fake than something irreproachably original and dull.